


A promise ring of scars

by Artemis_Crimson



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Osiris and Andal are mentioned, Poly Vanguard, also cayde is a baby guardian don't @ me, and how the main three got to the tower headcanons, suppoting your immortal partners through timeless trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:20:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25274563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis_Crimson/pseuds/Artemis_Crimson
Summary: In which they find the city find the city find the city find each other
Relationships: Cayde-6/Ikora Rey, Cayde-6/Ikora Rey/Zavala, Cayde-6/Zavala (Destiny), Ikora Rey/Zavala
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	A promise ring of scars

You can’t actually scold Ikora, Cayde thinks this is important to know. It’s not even like a law of physics- all three of them can and have broken all of those before. She’s not spoken of like a legend, her teachers are even though they’re dead or traitor. That she’s so sure and certain despite everything means, something he can’t articulate.

Sundance finds him out on the edge of nowhere, a solid century into the city age. In a shitty jumpship swallowed by the void. An alien spacecraft he’ll later learn is Awoken tries to hail him but with renegade disrespect he’s outpaced it already racing towards earth. Cayde’s seventh life feels like freedom and burns like defiance.

You can’t outlast Zavala. This is just common sense, sure Cayde is aware every Titan thinks they’re dependable. Often true he’s willing to acknowledge that- but if they had pictures of people in dictionaries Zavala would be a full colour spread, like a pre-golden age pinup of stalwart.

He doesn’t crash into the wall. He doesn’t! His ship’s jump drive gives out three hundred feet from it and explodes. Incidentally 250 is about the untethered transtat range and Sundance has this fantastic trick of preserving momentum through those warps of space-time.

Cayde’s first visit to the tower ends with his shiny metal guts splattered across the landing zone. A smiling hunter named Andal is there to scrape him up and show him the incident report he half fills.

Andal is dead and he’s the vanguard. He’s done his best to avoid his stiff new companions to be, he doesn’t want to morn with strangers. He’d rather slip away into a hunter’s den and drink through it wouldn’t do anything but echo out of reach delirium. He’s not stubborn enough, his arguments not persuasive enough. Big blue wraps an arm around his waist and Rey squeezes his shoulders. Against halfhearted protest they pull him to sit between them until the sun rises again.

* * *

You can’t catch Cayde. It’s like chasing smoke. Like caging air between your fists. He comes when called, he does the parts of his job no one else can. There’s something, spacey about him though, and Zavala doesn’t know how to ground him.

_Z_ avala crawls boiling, born anew in white clothing on white sand the bleached white skull of someone important he can’t remember the first face he sees. The only friendly face he sees for long years. Years spent dying and fighting to die slightly slower, slightly further along to rise then die and do it all again.

You can’t stop Ikora. Zavala thinks privately after bitter consensus meetings that nothing and no one can. She’s conviction in motion, her opposition always breaks against her advance be they enemy of humanity or academic rivals.

He builds the city. With his own two hands, his broken back and centuries of effort. He places countless bricks. Listens to grand speeches. Shares what little he has to eat because if he starves to death he gets back up. It’s gruelling, a slog that he’s never known anything but and never known anything like. He wakes up each day certain he’d do it again.

The walls are burning. They smoulder still but the brick of them, the bones still stands. Breached but not broken. The legion is breaking, none remain here in his home. His Guardians had been furious, with their strength returned and skills newly sharpened by caution they threw themselves at the legion like a single minded mass of hungry predators. They’ve been eradicated here, but the walls are burning and he must clean this up. Count the dead and build them a monument. Cayde catches his collar and Ikora grabs him around the bicep, pulling him to sit down and watch the sky a moment.

* * *

You can’t resist Cayde. In that he’s too charming for his own good and because he’s an inexorable force. Ikora knows she’s never been that good at restraint, not of others not her own. But Cayde calls to all the daredevil parts she’s long buried deep under fear of failure.

Ikora wakes up a wild no-one in a dead city. She reads paper books, steals golden age technology to warm her home and hunts fallen for their clothing just to make a statement. She grows bored of this in a decade or two, the challenge gone. She snaps the annoying guard off a shock sword and slings a shotgun over her shoulder before she leaves.

You can’t deny Zavala. There’s better poets in the city than Ikora, she’s at least humble enough to realize that. But still, she could write an epic on his conviction alone. When he speaks, on her better days the steady foundation of his ideals makes her want to build them. She almost wants tear them apart to prove she’s the unstoppable force in her worst moments.

Ikora is wild and no one, she’s not a legend not in the way her teacher is, or his mentors before. She’s not infamous. Not yet. Her Ghost tells her to ease up slow down that she’ll burn out. She picks up the pace in a steady beat, she carves her name into the crucible and the most fundamental physics she can.

When Osiris has left she had cried, angry. Furious tears that left her with a headache she solved by swallowing shotgun. She’d taken every inch of razor wire resolve she had and spooled it into the city he’d abandoned. The Last City would stand and it’s people would prosper and she would drag the world into something better. When Osiris returns, just as haughty just as brilliant their paths divergent and halfway to strangers she doesn’t cry. Her oath doesn’t feel like spite, it weighs heavy like dark age mantle, tungsten and ceremony. Like affectionate hands on her shoulders, one heavy flesh under carmine plasteel and one light metal through. Cayde’s spinfoil knuckles brush her jaw. Zavala squeezes her bicep like a bond, and silently they return to work.


End file.
